A couple of years ago I shared an article by Conor Friedersdorf, who is a writer whom I respect, entitled "Intersectionality is Not the Problem." I defended the article; but, since then, I've realized that I steel manned intersectionality more than I should have.
At a skin deep level one can argue, as Friedersdorf did, that intersectionality is basically just an acknowledgement that different people of different groups experience the world differently. Sure, I'm a white, cis-gender, straight man living in a majority white country with a lot of economic prosperity. I experience the world differently than a trans Arab who was born in Iran. That's fairly innocuous.
That's not where intersectionality stops, though. The inevitable push of intersectionality is disproportionately dealing of rights based on group identity and a back-of-the-napkin analysis of which group is more oppressed than the other. That's where intersectionality is absolutely the problem.
It's when you understand intersectionality that you get how Canada has decided to make it legally dangerous for female business owners to refuse to touch a trans-woman's penis. We're no longer talking about an individual's rights to consent or to disassociate. Laws like that are in place because people have decided that one group should have rights that the other shouldn't.
The purveyors of intersectionality don't even hide it anymore. Ibram X Kendi said in no uncertain terms that racial discrimination is something that he supports as a response to past racial discrimination.
This is all a product of the dangerous meme of intersectionality.
At a skin deep level, it's innocuous. The devil is in the details. When taken seriously, it's pro-racism and pro-rape just so long as it happens in a direction that they like.
